Fire hazard staying ‘low’ here for now

    With the weather putting a damper on the fire hazard, only one new fire reported yesterday in the Northwest Region.
    That blaze was located on the Winnipeg River in the Kenora District, and was responded to by FireRangers from the Kenora Fire Management Headquarters.
    The small lightning-caused fire was 0.1 hectares in size.
    It was the 213th fire of the season in the Northwest Region, bringing the total area consumed to 32,420.6 ha.
    No other fires are burning in the region right now, and the fire hazard is “low” in each of the seven districts, including here in Fort Frances.
    Six FireRanger crews from Kenora also were busy assisting with flooding on Highway 671 (the Jones Road) west of there yesterday.
    Firefighters were building sandbag dikes alongside the road, and were pumping headwaters around the dike into Mark Lake.
    At the Fort Frances MNR headquarters, local fire operations supervisor Marney Brown said all crews came home from Quebec late last week and now are taking advantage of the lull in fire activity.
    “Right now we’re continuing on with training with our crews, and various other tasks at forward attack bases and whatnot,” she noted this morning.
    “We’re shifting focus to those areas again now that we have the opportunity to do that.
    “Of course, once the hazard starts to increase again, we’ll get back into that response mode,” added Brown.
    “With the fire hazard being as low [as it] is currently, we are shifting gears and going back to more of the training we do on an annual basis.”
    Brown noted the number of occurrence fires in Fort Frances District has remained relatively low since April 1—20 to be exact, with no new fires for more than a week.
    The last one was a 0.1- ha blaze in the Crane Lake area which posed no problems.
    “It looks like we’ll have some unsettled weather for the next few days, but into next week, right now it looks like it might start to warm up again and gradually dry out,” Brown said.
    “But for the time being, it looks like we’ll remain at a ‘low’ hazard,” she added.